Venice in Peril at the Architecture Biennale, Venice until 25 November 2012

The Invisible Architect

The main pavilion at
this year’s Venice Architecture Biennale, curated by David Chipperfield,
contains a small exhibition dedicated to four restoration projects in Venice,
all designed by Mario Piana, and entitled The
Invisible Architect. The exhibition “addresses the often invisible common
ties between historical architecture and its present-day use”
and reflects on the predicaments faced by architects when planning maintenance,
repair and adaptation operations on buildings of historical interest.

The four projects
illustrated are the roofs over the Gaggiandre in the Arsenale and Palazzo
Grimani at S.ta Maria Formosa, both dating from the 16th century and
both financed by the Italian State, the 15th century Church of the
Miracoli, financed by our American sister organization, Save Venice Inc., and
the vernacular “council house” in the parish of San Giobbe, for which Venice in
Peril commissioned a team led by Mario Piana to produce restoration plans that
were then implemented by Venice City Council, using funds provided by the
Special Law for Venice.

The restoration work
was completed in 2006 and since then the four flats it created in the house,
previously abandoned and quickly deteriorating, have been fully occupied by
families on the housing list. The house was visited by Prince Charles in 2009
and its exemplary, innovative approach to the rehabilitation of non-monumental,
historic buildings is often cited in scientific and academic works.

Still available from
the Venice in Peril office is the book the Fund and the Milan publishers
Mazzotta brought out in 2006 to coincide with the inauguration of the
restoration. Un restauro per Venezia,tells the story of how ViP came to propose and carry through a project that
aimed both to provide a concrete contribution to rethinking Venice’s
housing/depopulation problem and to encouraging the application of rigorous
conservation standards to historic buildings not effectively covered by the
laws which protect the churches, monuments and palazzi of Venice. The book also gives detailed accounts of the
exhaustive preliminary research that underpinned the restoration project, the
principles that informed it, the work involved in carrying it out and how the
whole operation compared, in terms of cost, to other more destructive
restoration projects. The book figures prominently on required reading lists
for restoration courses at universities in Italy and Germany.